Many persons, themselves city-bred and city-reared, have fled to the
soil and succeeded in winning great happiness. In such cases they have
succeeded only by going through a process of savage disillusionment.
But with Dede and Daylight it was different. They had both been born on
the soil, and they knew its naked simplicities and rawer ways. They
were like two persons, after far wandering, who had merely come home
again. There was less of the unexpected in their dealings with nature,
while theirs was all the delight of reminiscence. What might appear
sordid and squalid to the fastidiously reared, was to them eminently
wholesome and natural. The commerce of nature was to them no unknown
and untried trade. They made fewer mistakes. They already knew, and
it was a joy to remember what they had forgotten.
And another thing they learned was that it was easier for one who has
gorged at the flesh-pots to content himself with the meagerness of a
crust, than for one who has known only the crust.
Not that their life was meagre. It was that they found keener delights
and deeper satisfactions in little things. Daylight, who had played
the game in its biggest and most fantastic aspects, found that here, on
the slopes of Sonoma Mountain, it was still the same old game. Man had
still work to perform, forces to combat, obstacles to overcome. When
he experimented in a small way at raising a few pigeons for market, he
found no less zest in calculating in squabs than formerly when he had
calculated in millions. Achievement was no less achievement, while the
process of it seemed more rational and received the sanction of his
reason.
The domestic cat that had gone wild and that preyed on his pigeons, he
found, by the comparative standard, to be of no less paramount menace
than a Charles Klinkner in the field of finance, trying to raid him for
several millions. The hawks and weasels and 'coons were so many
Dowsetts, Lettons, and Guggenhammers that struck at him secretly. The
sea of wild vegetation that tossed its surf against the boundaries of
all his clearings and that sometimes crept in and flooded in a single
week was no mean enemy to contend with and subdue. His fat-soiled
vegetable-garden in the nook of hills that failed of its best was a
problem of engrossing importance, and when he had solved it by putting
in drain-tile, the joy of the achievement was ever with him. He never
worked in it and found the soil unpacked and tractable without
experiencing the thrill of accomplishment.
There was the matter of the plumbing. He was enabled to purchase the
materials through a lucky sale of a number of his hair bridles. The
work he did himself, though more than once he was forced to call in
Dede to hold tight with a pipe-wrench. And in the end, when the
bath-tub and the stationary tubs were installed and in working order,
he could scarcely tear himself away from the contemplation of what his
hands had wrought. The first evening, missing him, Dede sought and
found him, lamp in hand, staring with silent glee at the tubs. He
rubbed his hand over their smooth wooden lips and laughed aloud, and
was as shamefaced as any boy when she caught him thus secretly exulting
in his own prowess.
It was this adventure in wood-working and plumbing that brought about
the building of the little workshop, where he slowly gathered a
collection of loved tools. And he, who in the old days, out of his
millions, could purchase immediately whatever he might desire, learned
the new joy of the possession that follows upon rigid economy and
desire long delayed. He waited three months before daring the
extravagance of a Yankee screw-driver, and his glee in the marvelous
little mechanism was so keen that Dede conceived forthright a great
idea. For six months she saved her egg-money, which was hers by right
of allotment, and on his birthday presented him with a turning-lathe of
wonderful simplicity and multifarious efficiencies. And their mutual
delight in the tool, which was his, was only equalled by their delight
in Mab's first foal, which was Dede's special private property.
It was not until the second summer that Daylight built the huge
fireplace that outrivalled Ferguson's across the valley. For all these
things took time, and Dede and Daylight were not in a hurry. Theirs
was not the mistake of the average city-dweller who flees in
ultra-modern innocence to the soil. They did not essay too much.
Neither did they have a mortgage to clear, nor did they desire wealth.
They wanted little in the way of food, and they had no rent to pay. So
they planned unambiguously, reserving their lives for each other and
for the compensations of country-dwelling from which the average
country-dweller is barred. From Ferguson's example, too, they profited
much. Here was a man who asked for but the plainest fare; who
ministered to his own simple needs with his own hands; who worked out
as a laborer only when he needed money to buy books and magazines; and
who saw to it that the major portion of his waking time was for
enjoyment. He loved to loaf long afternoons in the shade with his
books or to be up with the dawn and away over the hills.
On occasion he accompanied Dede and Daylight on deer hunts through the
wild canons and over the rugged steeps of Hood Mountain, though more
often Dede and Daylight were out alone. This riding was one of their
chief joys. Every wrinkle and crease in the hills they explored, and
they came to know every secret spring and hidden dell in the whole
surrounding wall of the valley. They learned all the trails and
cow-paths; but nothing delighted them more than to essay the roughest
and most impossible rides, where they were glad to crouch and crawl
along the narrowest deer-runs, Bob and Mab struggling and forcing their
way along behind. Back from their rides they brought the seeds and
bulbs of wild flowers to plant in favoring nooks on the ranch. Along
the foot trail which led down the side of the big canon to the intake
of the water-pipe, they established their fernery. It was not a formal
affair, and the ferns were left to themselves. Dede and Daylight
merely introduced new ones from time to time, changing them from one
wild habitat to another. It was the same with the wild lilac, which
Daylight had sent to him from Mendocino County. It became part of the
wildness of the ranch, and, after being helped for a season, was left
to its own devices they used to gather the seeds of the California
poppy and scatter them over their own acres, so that the orange-colored
blossoms spangled the fields of mountain hay and prospered in flaming
drifts in the fence corners and along the edges of the clearings.
Dede, who had a fondness for cattails, established a fringe of them
along the meadow stream, where they were left to fight it out with the
water-cress. And when the latter was threatened with extinction,
Daylight developed one of the shaded springs into his water-cress
garden and declared war upon any invading cattail. On her wedding day
Dede had discovered a long dog-tooth violet by the zigzag trail above
the redwood spring, and here she continued to plant more and more. The
open hillside above the tiny meadow became a colony of Mariposa lilies.
This was due mainly to her efforts, while Daylight, who rode with a
short-handled ax on his saddle-bow, cleared the little manzanita wood
on the rocky hill of all its dead and dying and overcrowded weaklings.
They did not labor at these tasks. Nor were they tasks. Merely in
passing, they paused, from time to time, and lent a hand to nature.
These flowers and shrubs grew of themselves, and their presence was no
violation of the natural environment. The man and the woman made no
effort to introduce a flower or shrub that did not of its own right
belong. Nor did they protect them from their enemies. The horses and
the colts and the cows and the calves ran at pasture among them or over
them, and flower or shrub had to take its chance. But the beasts were
not noticeably destructive, for they were few in number and the ranch
was large.
On the other hand, Daylight could have taken in fully a dozen horses to
pasture, which would have earned him a dollar and a half per head per
month. But this he refused to do, because of the devastation such
close pasturing would produce.
Ferguson came over to celebrate the housewarming that followed the
achievement of the great stone fireplace. Daylight had ridden across
the valley more than once to confer with him about the undertaking, and
he was the only other present at the sacred function of lighting the
first fire. By removing a partition, Daylight had thrown two rooms
into one, and this was the big living-room where Dede's treasures were
placed--her books, and paintings and photographs, her piano, the
Crouched Venus, the chafing-dish and all its glittering accessories.
Already, in addition to her own wild-animal skins, were those of deer
and coyote and one mountain-lion which Daylight had killed. The
tanning he had done himself, slowly and laboriously, in frontier
fashion.
He handed the match to Dede, who struck it and lighted the fire. The
crisp manzanita wood crackled as the flames leaped up and assailed the
dry bark of the larger logs. Then she leaned in the shelter of her
husband's arm, and the three stood and looked in breathless suspense.
When Ferguson gave judgment, it was with beaming face and extended hand.
"She draws! By crickey, she draws!" he cried.
He shook Daylight's hand ecstatically, and Daylight shook his with
equal fervor, and, bending, kissed Dede on the lips. They were as
exultant over the success of their simple handiwork as any great
captain at astonishing victory. In Ferguson's eyes was actually a
suspicious moisture while the woman pressed even more closely against
the man whose achievement it was. He caught her up suddenly in his
arms and whirled her away to the piano, crying out: "Come on, Dede! The
Gloria! The Gloria!"
And while the flames in the fireplace that worked, the triumphant
strains of the Twelfth Mass rolled forth.